Equinix Uses Facebook Tech to Build an Open Source-Based Ecosystem

Equinix’s partnership with Facebook continues to expand, as our common pursuit of innovation through collaboration has led us to team up to create an open source-based ecosystem in Equinix data centers.

The project, announced today, uses technology designed by Facebook and available from the Open Compute Project (OCP) – which Equinix just joined – to build the new ecosystem. Specifically, the ecosystem uses Wedge open source switches as part of its architecture.

The emerging ecosystem is for both software and hardware. It will be developed using additional contributions to the OCP on a new, open-source architecture that will enable faster innovation and greater efficiency in data center and hybrid cloud deployments. We believe this ecosystem will thrive in the network- and cloud-dense environment inside Equinix, home to 1,100 network service providers and 500-plus cloud service providers.

The need for the massive scaling and performance increases that open source software and hardware can provide is being driven by various trends:

A requirement for more robust infrastructure and platforms to support the high connectivity demands of the Internet of Things

That pressure on the enterprise to provide high-performance connectivity to increasingly dispersed end users is only growing with the volume of data traffic. Cisco projects a compound annual growth rate of 23% for global IP traffic between 2014 and 2019, and it says that traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by year’s end. Cisco also projects that two-thirds of IP traffic will originate on non-PC devices by 2019.

The OCP can help meet these challenges because it’s focused on finding ways to efficiently and economically scale computing infrastructure. We think when it’s teamed with the open source-based ecosystem, new innovations through interconnection will result.

Ultimately, this new ecosystem will provide our customers with an open source hardware and software platform on which they can cost-effectively execute mobile, Internet of Things and hybrid cloud deployments. It will be a place to push the limits of technology and develop tomorrow’s interconnection solutions. The new ecosystem will also be powered by enterprise software company Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System, which is ideal for open compute equipment because it aggregates all data center resources into a single pool. It also automatically schedules workloads where they can fit and simplifies the process of managing complex systems.

In sum, an open source-based ecosystem has great promise, and we’re thrilled to be working closely with Facebook to develop it. We believe this partnership can help define the next-generation architecture for the network and cloud edge. That means that as platforms and applications evolve, our customers will always have the scale and performance they need.